NGA and DigitalGlobe open source toolkit to harness the power of collaborative mapping

6/22/2015

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SPRINGFIELD, Virginia —
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and DigitalGlobe have
partnered to release an open source software toolkit designed to harness
the power of crowdsourced mapping for Geospatial Big Data Analytics.
The open source project Hootenanny
provides a scalable processing engine and interactive editing interface
to enable rapid conflation of map features generated from satellite
imagery, UAVs, and mobile devices.

In less than a decade crowdsourced mapping communities like OpenStreetMap™
have attracted over 2.5 million volunteers who have digitized more than
130 million buildings and 1.3 million miles of roads. Countless other
organizations and individuals are using satellite imagery and other
methods to capture the geometry and metadata of roads, buildings, and
points of interest. To create high quality maps and enable analytic
functions like routing, suitability analysis, or predictive modeling it
is important to unify multiple sources to create the best available
database.

“The commercialization of GEOINT is
leading to exponential growth of publicly available geospatial
information,” said Chris Rasmussen, NGA’s public software development
lead. “Hootenanny as an open source project will enable new levels of
data sharing across the community that will increase our nation’s
ability to quickly respond to emerging threats. This is a pro-active
move that steers into the collaborative mapping environment to derive
more value from unclassified sources.”

Hootenanny leverages the open architecture
of OpenStreetMap™ to facilitate integration of diverse geospatial
datasets into a common key value data structure. An open library of
conflation algorithms applies various techniques to unify the geometry
and metadata of topographic features. Conflicts can be visualized and
resolved through an interactive application built on the iD Editor, an
open source map editing tool developed by Mapbox. Conflated datasets can
be exported in a variety of GIS formats including ESRI Shapefile, File
Geodatabase, Web Feature Service, and native OpenStreetMap™ formats.
Hootenanny also enables Geospatial Extract Transform Load (ETL)
capabilities supporting various schemas such as Topographic Data Store
(TDS), and Multi-National Geospatial Co-Production Program (MGCP).

Hootenanny is available at: https://github.com/ngageoint/hootenanny.
The software use, modification, and distribution rights are stipulated
within the General Public License (GPL). DigitalGlobe and NGA will be
hosting a Hootennany MeetUp at the Washington D.C. Convention Center on
Wednesday, June 24 from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Room 143A.

March 21, 2019 — Today, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency launched MagQuest, a $1.2 million global open innovation challenge. NGA calls upon solvers to submit novel approaches to geomagnetic data collection for the World Magnetic Model.